Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 08/06/19

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, August 6, 2019

Night and Fog in Japan (Nagisa Oshima, 1960)

Cast: Fumio Watanabe, Miyuki Kuwano, Takao Yoshizawa, Akiko Koyama, Masahiko Tsugawa, Hiroshi Akutagawa, Kei Sato, Rokko Toura, Shinko Ujiie, Ichiro Hayami. Screenplay: Toshiro Ishido, Nagisa Oshima. Cinematography: Takashi Kawamata. Art direction: Koji Uno. Film editing: Keiichi Uraoka. Music: Riichiro Manabe.

The wedding of Nozawa (Fumio Watanabe) and Reiko (Miyuki Kuwano) is interrupted by protesters who denounce the couple for betraying the ideals of the Japanese student movement of the 1950s. Nagisa Oshima's Night and Fog in Japan is a heady portrait of ideological conflict filled with flashbacks as a variety of witnesses open old political wounds, but it's hard to follow especially for Westerners not well versed in the history of the period.